Citizens Only

The new benefits of citizenship

By Bill Wong

Another 10,000 swore allegiance to the red, white, and blue in San Jose last week. In two separate ceremonies this month, 8,000 people became U.S. citizens in San Francisco.

Over the last year, more than 300,000 Californians have become citizens. That total was one-third of the new citizens in the United States. The latest annualized figure for California is also five times what it was in 1990.

So what's going on here?

It's no secret that immigrants, both legal and illegal, have been under attack by conservative political forces in Washington and in Sacramento. Two years ago, Proposition 187 zeroed in on illegal immigrants. The recently enacted welfare reform law targets legal immigrants. And immigration legislation now pending in Congress reinforces the pressures to reduce or eliminate aspects of the relatively open immigration policies of the past generation.

Thus, it is no great surprise that legal permanent residents would want to become a full-fledged U.S. citizen.

In part, they are acting defensively. The welfare reform law takes away public benefits that legal immigrants had rights to. By becoming a citizen, they retain those rights.

"Pragmatic" is the word to describe this particular motivation. It is hardly an ennobling gesture, however.

Don't misunderstand. I am not critical of legal immigrants becoming citizens to protect their rights. That's both a smart and logical move. But pledging loyalty to the Stars and Stripes should be more than making sure one gets food stamps, Medicare, and Supplemental Security Income.

I shouldn't be so smug. As a citizen by virtue of American birth, I confess I take my citizenship rights for granted. So do millions of other American-born citizens.

Not a lot of us think hard and long about the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, even while we benefit from the values and principles laid out in those seminal documents that embody the American democracy at its best.

The First Amendment alone is worth the sacrifice that legal immigrants make when they embark on their journeys here. The right to free speech, free political association, free religious affiliations. Money can't buy those freedoms. To say nothing of constitutional protections against illegal searches and seizures as well as tyrannical judicial procedures and other values that distinguish American democracy.

Even though it seems clear many legal immigrants are becoming citizens to not lose their rights to social-service programs, I am certain many also embrace the principles of freedom that link all of us regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, culture, national origin, or gender.

I know I am beginning to sound like the lyrics to some Francis Scott Key tune. I do not mean to be hallucinatory about the American democracy. We as a society obviously have flaws aplenty.

One of them is the kind of intolerance that has ignited the rush to citizenship. That intolerance puzzles Bill Ong Hing, a visiting professor at Boalt Hall Law School at the University of California at Berkeley and author of a book about Asian American immigration history.

He simply doesn't understand, nor do I, why Congress, in its welfare reform legislation, didn't exempt legal immigrants who came to the United States as refugees. The distinction between refugees and immigrants is important, Hing feels.

Refugees generally need public assistance, whereas most immigrants don't. Even when refugees gain legal-immigrant status, they should still be eligible for social safety-net programs. But they aren't. The internal contradictions of our society, as exemplified by the meanness of the welfare reform law and the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, should continue to animate our public life as we approach a new millennium.

Bill Wong is an independent journalist, a commentator on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and a regular contributor to AsianWeek.